Thursday, November 5 saw the Cardiff journalism post-graduates welcome the charismatic and fascinating Dan Meadows.
In 1973 he set off in a double-decker bus – JRR404 – which quickly became known as the Free Photographic Omnibus.
He travelled the county taking photos of people, and has since retraced them and found out the story of how his subjects moved on after a quarter of a century.
This was Mr Meadows’ first step into journalism and since then he has worked for Granada television, as a lecturer and the BBC, though it was his discovery in America of digital storytelling which got his creative juices ticking.
Digital storytelling is a different way of getting a message across.
Mr Meadows describes them as:
Short, personal, multimedia scraps of TV that people can make for themselves.
They’re ‘mini-movies’. Desktop computers enabled with video editing software are used to synchronise recorded spoken narratives with scans of personal photographs.
Quote taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/about/pages/introduction.shtml
Old photos found by scratching around in the house can be given a new lease of life, and bought very much into the twenty-first century or Digital Britain for use of another catchphrase.
Below are three examples:
1 - The first is from the BBC’s project Capture Wales which Dan Meadows helped to launch, and demonstrates an average person’s ability to utilise this tool. This example is Paula Richards’ experience of the Welsh Miners Strike.
2 - The second shows how they can be used in news reporting as David Reynolds illustrates Lyndon B. Johnson’s final days in the Oval Office (click on the picture to be taken to the BBC website)
3 - The final example is taken from a documentary – Part of the Weekend Never Dies - and utilises animation instead of stills, but tells a story in the same way.
